among the diffusion indexes released this week were the Dallas Fed Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey, which indicated its general business activity index fell from -13.9 to -20.8, the seventeenth consecutive negative reading for that index, indicating a still deepening recession in the Texas oil patch economy, and both of the widely followed reports from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM): the May Manufacturing Report On Business indicated that the manufacturing PMI (Purchasing Managers Index) increased from 50.8% in April to 51.3% in May, which still suggests a sluggish expansion in manufacturing firms nationally, and the May Non-Manufacturing Report On Business; which saw the NMI (non-manufacturing index) fall to 52.9%, from 55.7% in April, indicating a smaller plurality of service industry purchasing managers reported expansion in various facets of their business...both of those ISM reports are easy to read and include anecdotal comments from purchasing managers from the 34 business types who participate in those surveys nationally...

May Report Shows 21,000 Fewer Jobs than Last Report, ‘Not In Labor Force’ at a Record High

the Employment Situation Summary for May showed the weakest monthly job creation since September 2010 and a drop in both the labor force participation rate and the unemployment rate, while the employment rate was unchanged....estimates extrapolated from the establishment survey data indicated that employers added a seasonally adjusted 38,000 jobs in May, after the payroll job increase for March was revised down from 208,000 to 186,000 and the April jobs increase was revised down from 160,000 to 123,000, meaning the combined number of jobs created over those two months was 59,000 less than was previously reported, and hence payroll jobs indicated by this report are actually down by 21,000 from the previous report…as a result, fewer additional jobs have been created in the first 5 months of this year than in the same period of any year since 2009...

seasonally adjusted job increases in May were mostly in the health care service, retail, hospitality and government sectors with widespread job losses through most other sectors...the health care and social assistance sector added 55,400 jobs in May, with 16,500 of those in hospitals and 9,000 working in doctor's offices...the retail sector added 11,400 jobs, with 10,300 of those in general merchandise stores other than department stores...the leisure and hospitality sector added 11,000 jobs by virtue of 22,200 additional jobs in bars and restaurants, while jobs in arts, entertainment, and recreation fell by 10,400, and there were 13,000 new government jobs, with 9,700 of those in the postal service...job losses included 11,000 in the resource extraction sector, 15,000 in construction, 18,000 in durable goods manufacturing, 21,000 in temporary help employment services and 34,000 in the information sector...the later was impacted by a strike of Verizon workers during the reference week, which showed up as a loss of 37,200 jobs in telecommunications....

the establishment survey also showed that average hourly pay for all employees rose by 5 cents to $25.59 an hour, after it had increased by a revised 9 cents an hour in April; at the same time, the average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory employees increased by 3 cents to $21.49 an hour...employers also reported that the average workweek for all private payroll employees was unchanged at 34.4 hours, meaning the increase to 34.5 hours shown in April was revised away, while hours for production and non-supervisory personnel was also unchanged from a similarly downwardly revised 33.6 hours...meanwhile, the manufacturing workweek rose 0.2 hours to 40.8 hours, after the April manufacturing workweek was also revised down a tenth of an hour, while factory overtime was at 3.3 hours for the sixth month in a row...

the data extrapolation from the May household survey estimated that the seasonally adjusted number of those who were employed rose by 26,000 to 151,030,000; while the estimated number of unemployed fell by 484,000 to 7,436,000; and thus the labor force decreased by a total of 458,000...since the working age population grew by 205,000 at the same time, that meant the number of employment aged individuals not in the labor force increased by 664,000 to a record 94,708,000, which was enough to clip the labor force participation rate by another 0.2%, as it has now fallen from 63.0% in March to 62.6% in May...with the number employed relatively unchanged, the employment to population ratio, which we could think of as an employment rate, was unchanged at 59.7%...meanwhile, with the large decrease in the unemployed, most of whom just quit looking for work, the unemployment rate fell by 0.3% to 4.7%...at the same time, there was a large 468,000 increase in the number who reported they were involuntarily working just part time, from 5,962,000 in April to 6,430,000 in May, which meant the alternative measure of unemployment, U-6, which includes those "employed part time for economic reasons" remained unchanged at 9.7% of the labor force in May...

like most reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment situation press release itself is easy to read and understand, so you can get more details on these two reports from there...note that almost every paragraph in that release points to one or more of the tables that are linked to on the bottom of the release, and those tables are also on a separate html page here that you can open it along side the press release to avoid the need to scroll up and down the page....

April Personal Incomes Up 0.4%, Spending Up 1.0%, On Track to add 2.05 Percentage Points to 2nd Quarter GDP

other than the employment report and the GDP report itself, the monthly report on Personal Income and Outlays from theBureau of Economic Analysis is probably the most important economic release we see monthly; as each monthly report on personal consumption expenditures (PCE) accounts for roughly 23% of GDP by itself...in addition, this report also includes the PCE price index, the inflation gauge the Fed targets, and which is used to adjust that personal spending data for inflation to give us the relative change in the output of goods and services that our spending indicated, monthly personal income data, disposable personal income, which is income after taxes, and our monthly savings rate...however, because this report feeds in to GDP and other national accounts data, the change reported for each of those are not the current monthly change; rather, they're seasonally adjusted amounts at an annual rate, ie, they tell us how much income and spending would increase for a year if April's adjusted income and spending were extrapolated over an entire year...however, the percentage changes are computed monthly, from one month's annualized figure to the next, and in this case of this month's report they give us the percentage change in each annualized metric from March to April..

thus, when the opening line of the press release for this report tell us "Personal income increased $69.8 billion, or 0.4 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $63.5 billion, or 0.5 percent, in April", they mean that the annualized figure for seasonally adjusted personal income in April, $15,697.9 billion, was $69.8 billion, or actually somewhat more than 0.4% greater than the annualized personal income figure of $15,788.9 billion extrapolated for March; the actual, unadjusted change in personal income from March to April is not given...at the same time, annualized disposable personal income, which is income after taxes, rose by almost 0.5%, from an annual rate of an annual rate of $13,792.0 billion in March to an annual rate of $13,855.4 billion in April...likewise, all the contributors to the increase in personal income, listed under "Compensation" in the press release, are also annualized amounts, all of which can be more clearly seen in the Full Release & Tables (PDF) for this release...so when the press release, or a news account copying from it says, "Wages and salaries increased $38.6 billion in April, compared with an increase of $30.7 billion in March", that really means wages and salaries would increase by $38.6 billion over an entire year if April's seasonally adjusted increase in wages and salaries were extrapolated over that year, just as personal current transfer payments from government agencies rose at a $12.5 billion annual rate and interest and dividend income, sometimes the largest contributor to the monthly personal income increase, rose at a $7.2 billion annual rate in April....so you can see what's written in the press release is misleading, and often leads to media reports that parrot those lines the same way the BEA wrote them, and why we favor referencing the pdf in reviewing this report...

for the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) that we're most interested in today, BEA reports that they increased at a $119.2 billion rate, or a bit less than 1.0% from March, as the annual rate of PCE rose from $12,526.5 billion in March to $12,645.8 in April....March PCE was revised from $12,526.6 billion annually to $12,526.5 billion, while February PCE was revised higher, from $12,513.9 billion annual to $12,522.9 billion, which reduced the February to March change to 0.0%, which some cited as a downward revision....the current dollar increase in April spending resulted from a $68.6 billion annualized increase to an annualized $4,041.5 billion in spending for goods and a $50.6 billion increase to an annualized $8,604.3 billion in spending for services, so we can see the unusually large contribution from April retail sales....total personal outlays for April, which includes interest payments, and personal transfer payments in addition to PCE, rose by an annualized $121.7 billion to $13,104.3 billion annually, which left total personal savings, which is disposable personal income less total outlays, at a $751.1 billion annual rate in April , down from the revised $809.4 billion in annualized personal savings in March... as a result, the personal saving rate, which is personal savings as a percentage of disposable personal income, fell to 5.4% in April from the March savings rate of 5.9%...

as you know, before personal consumption expenditures are used in the GDP computation, they must first be adjusted for inflation to give us the real change in consumption, and hence the real change in goods and services that were produced for that consumption....that's done with the price index for personal consumption expenditures, which is a chained price index based on 2009 prices = 100, which is included in Table 9 in the pdf for this report...that index rose from 109.939 in March to 110.276 in April, a month over month inflation rate that's statistically 0.3065%, which BEA reports as an increase of 0.3 percent, following the PCE price index increase of 0.1% in March...applying that inflation adjustment to the nominal amounts left real PCE up 0.6% in April, after the March real PCE increase was revised to statistically unchanged ...note that when those price indexes are applied to a given month's annualized PCE in current dollars, it yields that month's annualized real PCE in our familiar chained 2009 dollars, which are the means that the BEA uses to compare one month's or one quarter's real goods and services produced to another....that result is shown in table 7 of the PDF, where we see that April's chained dollar consumption total works out to 11,467.7 billion annually, 0.6433% more than March's 11,394.4 billion, a difference that the BEA reports as 0.6%...

however, to estimate the impact of the change in PCE on the change in GDP, the month over month change doesn't help us much, since GDP is reported quarterly...thus we have to compare April's real PCE to the the real PCE of the 3 months of the first quarter....while this report shows PCE for all those amounts monthly, the BEA also provides the annualized chained dollar PCE for those three months in table 8 in the pdf for this report, where we find that the annualized real PCE for the 1st quarter was represented by 11,330.7 billion in chained 2009 dollars..(ie, the same as is shown in table 3 of the pdf for the 1st quarter GDP report)....when we compare April PCE of 11,467.7 to the 1st quarter real PCE of 11,384.2, we find that April real PCE has grown at a 2.97% annual rate compared to the 1st quarter....this means that even if April real PCE does not improve during May and June, growth in PCE would still add 2.05 percentage points to the growth rate of the 2nd quarter...

Trade Deficit Increases 5.4% in April after Downward Revisions to Past 3 Years

the Census report on our international trade in goods and services for April release included an annual revision which revised statistics on trade in goods and services for the January 2013 to March 2016 period; as a result, our goods and services deficit was revised downward 3.5 percent for 2013, downward 3.6 percent for 2014, and downward 7.3 percent for 2015, and hence all changes in this month's report are from those revised figures, as if previously published monthly reports never existed....thus, from those revised figures, this report indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods and services trade deficit rose by $1.9 billion to $37.4 billion in April from a March deficit which was effectively revised from the previously reported $40.4 billion down to $35.5 billion...the value of our April exports rose from the revised figures by $2.6 billion to $182.8 on a $2.9 billion increase to $120.1 billion in our exports of goods and a $0.3 billion decrease to $62.7 billion in our exports of services, while our imports rose $4.5 billion to $220.2 billion on a $4.3 billion increase to $178.9 billion in our imports of goods and a $0.3 billion increase to $41.4 billion in our imports of services (totals dont add due to rounding)...export prices averaged a 0.5% increase in April, so real exports will be reduced from the nominal amounts by 0.5% in national accounts data, while import prices were 0.3% higher, meaning real imports were smaller than the nominal dollar values reported here by that percentage....

most of the increase in our April exports could be accounted for by higher exports of industrial supplies and materials and of automotive vehicles parts, and engines....referencing the Full Release and Tables for October (pdf), in Exhibit 7 we find that our exports of industrial supplies and materials rose by $1,792 million to $32,475 million on increases in excess of $200 million in our exports of fuel oil, petroleum products other than fuel oil and organic chemicals...our exports of automotive vehicles, parts, and engines rose by $839 million to $12,937 million on a $363 million increase in our exports of automotive parts other than tires and engines...in addition, our exports of foods, feeds and beverages rose by $420 million to $9,835 million on a $114 million increase in our exports of corn, our exports of consumer goods rose by $188 million to $15,830 million on a $298 million increase in our exports of gem diamonds, and our exports of capital goods rose by $109 million to $43,524 million on increases in excess of $200 million in exports of computer accessories, aircraft parts, and electric apparatuses, which were partially offset by a $375 million decrease in our exports of oilfield drilling equipment...at the same time, our exports of other goods not categorized by end use fell by $583 million to $5,025 million....

Exhibit 8 in the Full Release and Tables gives us seasonally adjusted details on our imports and shows that our imports of most end use categories increased, led by a $2,507 million increase to $49,589 million in our imports of capital goods, mostly due to a $796 million increase in our imports of civilian aircraft, a $394 million increase in our imports of computers, and a $321 million increase in our imports of electrical apparatuses...our imports of industrial supplies and materials rose by $1131 million to $33,971 million on a $288 million increase in our imports of petroleum products other than fuel oil and a $171 million increase in our imports of crude oil, and smaller increases in our imports of other materials... our imports of consumer goods rose by $509 million to $46,757 million on a $431 million increase in our imports of cotton apparel and household goods, a $382 million increase in our imports of toys, games, and sporting goods, and a $316 million increase in our imports of televisions and video equipment and increases in a number of other consumer goods which were partially offset by a $1256 million decrease in our imports of cellphones and a $786 million decrease in our imports of pharmaceutical preparations....in addition, our imports of automotive vehicles, parts and engines rose $498 million to $28,772 million on a $712 million increase in our imports of automotive parts other than tires and engines, and our imports of foods, feeds, and beverages rose by $222 million to $10,723 million on higher imports of most foodstuffs, while our imports of goods not categorized by end use fell by $530 million to $7,361 million...

obviously, with the smaller than previously reported trade deficit over the past three years, GDP for each of those years will have to be revised higher, but that won't happen until the annual revisions to GDP are prepared later this summer...i'm not sure how the BEA will handle these revisions as they impact first quarter trade when the third estimate of 1st quarter GDP is released later this month...to gauge the impact of April trade on 2nd quarter growth figures, we'll use exhibit 10 in the pdf for this report, which gives us monthly goods trade figures by end use category and in total, already adjusted in chained 2009 dollars, the same inflation adjustment used by the BEA to compute trade figures for GDP, albeit they are not annualized here.....from that table, we can estimate that 1st quarter real exports of goods averaged 117,576.3 million monthly in 2009 dollars, while inflation adjusted April exports were at 119,462 million in the same 2009 dollar quantity index representation... annualizing the change between the two figures, we find that April's real exports are running at a 6.6% annual rate above those of the 1st quarter, or at a pace that would add about 0.51 percentage points to 2nd quarter GDP if continued through May and June.....in a similar manner, we find that our 1st quarter real imports averaged 178,034 million monthly in chained 2009 dollars, while inflation adjusted April imports were at 177,996 million...that would indicate that so far in the 2nd quarter, our real imports have decreased at a 2.1% annual rate from those of the 1st quarter...since imports subtract from GDP because they represent the portion of consumption or investment that occurred during the quarter that was not produced domestically, their decrease at a 2.1% rate would thus add about 0.27 percentage points to 2nd quarter GDP....hence, if the April trade deficit is maintained throughout the 1st quarter, our improving balance of trade in goods would add about 0.78 percentage points to the growth of 2nd quarter GDP....note that we have not computed the impact of the less volatile change in services here because the Census does not provide inflation adjusted data on those and we don't have easy access to all their price changes...

Construction Spending Falls 1.8% in April after February and March are Revised Higher

the April report on construction spending (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that our seasonally adjusted construction spending for the month would work out to $1,133.9 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 1.8 percent (±1.3%) below the revised annualized estimate of $1,155.1 billion in construction spending in March and 4.5 percent (±1.6%) above the estimated annualized level of construction spending of April last year......March construction spending was originally reported at $1,137.5 billion annually, and it has now been revised up to $1,155.1 billion annually, while February construction spending was revised up from a $1,133.6 billion annual rate to a $1,137.9 billion rate...the combined revisions to February and March construction spending should add about 0.18 percentage points to first quartet GDP when the third estimate is released the last week of June...

private construction spending was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $843.1 billion in April, 1.5 percent (±0.8%) below the revised March estimate of $855.9 billion, with residential spending of $439.7 billion 1.5 percent (±1.3%) below the upwardly revised annual rate of $446.3 billion in March, while private non-residential construction spending fell 1.5 percent (±0.8%) to $403.5 billion from the revised March level on 3.6% decreases in private spending for construction of both commercial and health care facilities and a 7.2% decrease in communication construction spending...at the same time, public construction spending was estimated to be at an annual rate of $290.8 billion, 2.8 percent (±2.5%) below the revised March estimate of $299.2 billion, with spending for highway construction down 6.6 percent (±7.2%)* to an annual rate of $89,384 billion, which was still 4.0% higher than a year earlier...

construction spending inputs into 3 subcomponents of GDP; investment in private non-residential structures, investment in residential structures, and into government investment outlays, for both state and local and Federal governments...however, getting an accurate read on the impact of April spending reported in this release on 2nd quarter GDP is difficult because all figures given here are nominal and as you know, data used to compute the change in GDP must be adjusted for changes in price, and the National Income and Product Accounts Handbook, Chapter 6 (pdf), lists a multitude of privately published deflators that are used by the BEA for each of the various components of non-residential investment....so to quickly come up with rough estimate on real construction over the period in question, we've decided to use the producer price index for final demand construction as an inexact shortcut... that index showed that aggregate construction costs were up 0.8% in April, up 0.1% in March and down 0.1% in February and down 0.5% in January....on that basis, we can estimate that April construction costs were roughly 0.9% greater than those of February and 0.8% greater than those of January...we then use those percentages to inflate spending for each of those months, which is arithmetically the same as deflating April construction spending, for comparison purposes...construction spending in millions of dollars for the first quarter is given as 1,155,122 for March, 1,137,868 for February, and 1,121,975 for January ...thus to compare April's inflation adjusted construction spending to that of the first quarter, our formula becomes: 1,133,932 / ((1,155,122*1.008 + 1,137,868 *1.009 + 1,121,975 * 1.008)/3) = 0.98791, meaning real construction spending in April was down roughly 1.2% vis a vis the 1st quarter, or down at a 4.75% annual rate...to figure the effect of that change on GDP, we annualize the difference between the first quarter average and April and take the result as a fraction of 1st quarter GDP and find that April construction spending is falling at a rate that would subtract 0.34 percentage points from 2nd quarter GDP…

this report also indicated that the seasonally adjusted value of April factory shipments rose for the second month in a row after being down 8 straight months, increasing by $2.2 billion or 0.5 percent to $456.8 billion, following a 0.3 percent increase in March, which had previously been reported as an 0.5% increase...shipments of durable goods were up by $1.3 billion or 0.5 percent to $232.5 billion, down from the 0.6% increase that was reported last week...meanwhile, the value of shipments (and hence of "new orders") of non-durable goods rose by $1.0 billion, or 0.4%, to $224.3 billion, as a 1.8% increase in the value of shipments from refineries was offset by lower shipments of other nondurables...

meanwhile, the aggregate value of April factory inventories fell for the 9th time in the past ten months, decreasing by $0.5 billion or 0.1 percent to $620.8 billion, following a March increase of 0.1% that was reported as a 0.2% increase last month....inventories of durable goods decreased $0.6 billion to $384.5, revised from the $0.2 billion decrease that was reported was reported last week....the value of non-durable goods' inventories was statistically unchanged at $236.3 billion, following a decrease of 0.1% in March....producer prices for finished goods were up 0.2% in April, with producer prices for energy goods also up 0.2%, so after non-durable factory inventories are adjusted for inflation, non-durable inventories will show a real decrease on the order of 0.3% for the month...with only this month of factory inventory data to go on, then, it looks like this decrease will contribute to a modest subtraction from 2nd quarter GDP figures, although a lot can change between now and the end of July when the first estimate for the 2nd quarter will be released…

note on the graphs used here

in March a year ago the St Louis Fed, home to the FRED graphs, changed their graphs to an interactive format, which apparently necessitated eliminating some of the incompatible options which we had used in creating our static graphs before then...as a result, many of the FRED graphs we've included on this website previous to that date, all of which were all created and stored at the FRED site and which we'd always hyperlinked back there, were reformatted, which in many cases changed our bar graphs to line graphs, and some cases rendered them unreadable... however, you can still click the text links we've always used in referring to them to view versions of our graphs as interactive graphs on the FRED site, or in the case where an older graph has gone missing, click on the blank space where it had been in order to view it in the new format....